Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 11143. Church hurt is a real and painful thing, and I want to say that plainly before anything else. Whether it came from a controlling pastor, a gossiping small group, a public discipline handled cruelly and without grace, or simply years of being quietly overlooked and unappreciated, this kind of wound cuts deeper than…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11123. prayer for healing belongs at the heart of ordinary Christian life, not at the fringes of it, and I want to say that plainly because some believers, wary of the excesses they have seen in certain corners of the charismatic movement, quietly stop asking God for physical healing altogether. Scripture never gives us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60110. Prayers for healing are among the most heartfelt any of us ever pray, and one of the hardest things in pastoral ministry is standing beside someone whose prayer has not been answered. I have done it many times, and I have never got used to it. So this article on prayers for healing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60023. Televised faith healers have produced a recognisable style: the platform, the word of knowledge about a condition somewhere in the auditorium, the hand on the forehead, the person falling backwards, the announcement of a miracle, and then the appeal for a gift of faith. Millions watch. Many send money they cannot spare. And…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11096 Should Christians use doctors, or does going to the surgery show a shortage of faith? I have been asked this more often than you might expect, usually in a low voice by someone who has been told by a well-meaning friend that real believers trust God rather than the NHS. The question deserves…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 11040. The claim that you can activate your healing by speaking God’s Word over your body is one of the most widely taught and most damaging errors circulating in the church today, and it needs answering carefully rather than dismissively. It needs care because the people who teach it use Bible verses, and the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8035. Whether demons can cause physical illness is a question the New Testament answers with more directness than many Christians expect, and with more care than many teachers show. The Gospels do connect certain conditions with demonic activity. They also, in the same breath, refuse to make that connection universal. Getting this right matters…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 7079. Physical healing as a guaranteed benefit of the atonement is taught confidently in a good many places, and the proof text is almost always the same. Isaiah says that with his stripes we are healed, Peter quotes it, and the conclusion drawn is that sickness in a believer indicates either unconfessed sin or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04121. Laying on hands for the sick is one of those practices that can provoke suspicion in one congregation and warm expectation in another, and I think both reactions usually owe more to cultural memory than to careful exegesis. Before we let televangelist excess on one side, or stiff cessationist caution on the other,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4109. Sign gifts are often assumed, even by thoughtful Christians, to have belonged exclusively to the twelve apostles, as a kind of one-off credential to authenticate their unique office. Philip’s ministry in Samaria makes that assumption very hard to sustain. Luke tells us plainly that unclean spirits came out of many who were possessed,…